Selves are the mirrors of God
Selves are the mirrors of God/Source. A human looking in the mirror is a mirror looking at itself. When you quiet the chattering mind, the mirror is dissolved. With the mirror gone, what remains is God/Source. With only God/Source remaining, even the sentence “I am God/Source” becomes nonsensical, since the division of an “I” that “is” something, the division of the world into subjects with properties, is revealed to be a category mistake of the world of mirrors.
The word idolatry, is the worship of idols. Any worship that creates any distinction is a form of idolatry. The only way to not be idolatrous is to worship God/Source, but given worship is etymologically the act of finding worth, and given worth presupposes a distinction between worthy/worthless, worship itself belongs to the world of mirrors1. To abide in the sacred is not to worship it, but to be it. Only those who have identified with the mirror worship. But in doing so they have forgotten who they are.
All entities that demand our worship are idols, because all entities are idols. The ego is an idol too. But in killing God/Source, it makes for a poor replacement for organizing society, since it doesn’t fulfill Durkheim’s advice:
“What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to…regulate his actions by something other than…his own egoism.”2
– Emile Durkheim
Hence why Solzhenitsyn’s insight depicted is astute.
When we remember we are not the mirrors but the reflection of “something other”, then we can regulate ourselves properly.
All societies that don’t recognize the sacred inevitably sail to some kind of Gulag Archipelago.
Whether their idols are “efficiency”, “capitalism” and “progress”, or the false gods of any major religion that has made idols out of the mystical experiences of their founders.
The deepest experience of the sacred unfailingly results in unconditional love, since the veil of separation is lifted, and the majesty of all that is, is abided in. It does not create inflation, for in the absence of self there is nothing to be inflated, it does not create pride, since there is no self to look down on those who did not have the mystical experience. It is unconditional, for it is beyond all conditions, and it is love because that is the only thing that is real. The Primordial Eros of Parmenides3 is reality itself, and it’s heartbeat is Love.
Ariane Labyrinth astutely commented that “worship can also be an act of love. And devotion is often a means of dissolving the mirror.”
From Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society, p.331, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1984/1893.
See Wikipedia entry on Eros, subsection Primordial God.